John Berry / The Post-StandardCarol Murphy (left) and Kathy Olszewski, both with the Onondaga County Board of Elections, work on an audit of voting machines Thursday.

Syracuse, NY -- Onondaga County’s two elections commissioners sank into chairs in a quiet office — a refuge from the paper war under way in the next room between the campaigns for U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei, D-DeWitt, and Republican challenger Ann Marie Buerkle.

Since unofficial election night results showed a race too close to call, more than a dozen campaign workers have commandeered the desks, copy machines, computers and even some elections board staff in an otherwise orderly government office on the 15th floor of the Civic Center.

“We’ll do whatever they want us to do,” Commissioner Ed Ryan, a Democrat, said with a calm smile.

“To a point,” added Commissioner Helen Kiggins, a Republican, who was not hiding her frustration.

The two elections commissioners are trying to balance decorum with public access as they preside over a new paper-ballot voting system that creates unprecedented volumes of records for lawyers to challenge.

This is the first general election in which every voter in Onondaga County voted by shading in bubbles on a paper ballot instead of moving levers on a sturdy machine. The old machines either worked or didn’t work, but there was no paper trail to follow after the election.

Voting is still a private act between one person and a piece of paper. But once the voter slips the new paper ballot into the scanning machine, there is a public record for lawyers to scrutinize for stray marks and food stains.

The lawyers are starting by inspecting each voter’s application for an absentee ballot. Each one presents an opportunity for a candidate to challenge whether a voter was really absent, sick or in jail on Election Day. Next, they are looking at the voter’s signature on the envelope containing the secret absentee ballot to see whether it matches the one the voter put on file at the board of elections many years ago.

Maffei, who is behind by 711 votes in the unofficial count, went to court to force the elections boards in four counties to allow the campaigns to inspect these documents immediately. Maffei also preserved the option to request a hand recount of every paper ballot cast on Election Day.

In Onondaga County, that means commissioners would have to inspect and tally each vote for Congress on 140,000 individual ballots with an audience of lawyers watching and ready to question the voter’s true intent.

State Supreme Court Justice Brian DeJoseph reserved the option to allow the board of elections to miss a Dec. 1 deadline set by state law for the county to certify election results.

Kiggins said, “We will do everything in our power to make sure we have someone certified by Christmas.”

She said she has never seen anything like it in her 31 years on the job.

At the downtown Civic Center and at a warehouse on Thompson Road, the Onondaga County commissioners try to comply with the court order, but they are anxious about the dozens of people from two rival campaigns coming within inches of real, live ballots.

One example: Two representatives for Maffei and two for Buerkle sit around an elections board staff member, who holds a tray of a few hundred absentee ballots in sealed envelopes. She holds up one envelope, showing the typed name and address and date stamp on one side and the voter’s signature on the flip side. An observer, most often from the Maffei camp, will ask for a copy. The worker asks the four observers to scoot their chairs back and not touch anything while she walks across the room to the copy machine, leaving a tray of unopened ballots on her desk.

In three days, they looked at only about 10 percent of the 17,000 documents, rang up $600 in copying fees and occupied the time of three elections board workers for a combined 63 hours. Finally, the Maffei campaign asked commissioners whether they could just copy everything.

On Friday, commissioners went back to Judge DeJoseph to clarify how many copies the campaigns could request.

The judge ruled that the campaigns could have copies of each document.

The board of elections borrowed machines from two other county offices, locked the doors and started making copies. The number of pages could reach 46,000 — a stack 15 feet tall. The campaigns could pay as much as $12,000 each.

All of this is opposition research — with the two sides looking for absentee ballots to challenge when elections commissioners try to open the envelopes Wednesday. That stack of challenged envelopes will wind up before a judge in state Supreme Court, each side hoping to preserve favorable votes and bounce likely opponents.

Judging stray marks

In 2003, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, requiring all states to have voting systems that allowed voters with disabilities to have the same privacy as everyone else. That required buying new machines in New York, where old lever machines were not accessible to everyone.

Many elections commissioners, including Onondaga County’s, rooted for the state to buy machines with electronic touch screens. But the League of Women Voters and other advocacy groups wanted paper ballots.

Kiggins said last week that this is the kind of scenario she feared.

Absentee voters have cast ballots on paper for years, and lawyers have used that paper trail to challenge votes in court.

A tight race for Salina town justice in 2007 set a legal precedent for paper records that Onondaga County will follow this year when it comes to stray marks on ballots. State Supreme Court Justice Deborah Karalunas ruled that the board of elections should count three absentee ballots it had previously rejected because they contained extraneous marks. An appeals court overturned her decision.

Now, Onondaga County commissioners say they will throw out any ballot with extraneous marks. That means a coffee stain, a doodle outside the box — any mark outside the oval bubble for a candidate. The commissioners said they will, however, allow an X or a checkmark as long as it is in the oval.

Out-of-town guns

Maffei and Buerkle have hired political operatives from Albany to fight for them.

Maffei hired Frank Hoare, an attorney from the Featherstonhaugh, Wiley and Clyne firm. Hoare said he worked in recent years on congressional recounts in Corning, Buffalo and a close race last year between Rep. Bill Owens and Republican Doug Hoffman in the North Country.

Hoare was executive director of the state Democratic Committee and worked for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and the state Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

Buerkle hired Jeff Buley, an attorney from the Brown & Weinraub firm. Buley was special counsel to former Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno from 1995 to 1998 and represented the New York State Republican Committee from 1991 to 2006. He has also worked on the re-election campaigns of former Gov. George Pataki, President George W. Bush and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Early in the week, there were some easy moments, when the lawyers and elections commissioners learned each other’s terminology for ballots and even bantered about their families.

By Friday, tempers were flaring.

When the judge called everyone to court to discuss the volume of paper copies, Hoare said in open court that he wanted Kiggins removed from the process. The judge declined to hear the request. Kiggins called the comment inappropriate.

No more calls to voters

Even the judge tried to learn Maffei’s strategy.

Earlier in the week, members of the Maffei campaign started calling and visiting people who voted by absentee ballot to ask them how they voted. Absentee voters were unnerved to discover that campaign workers knew that they had voted by absentee ballot.

The Buerkle campaign drove home that point in court Friday, when it asked elections staff to black out voters’ phone numbers on documents it copies. Everyone agreed.

Hoare told the judge the campaign was using the absentee-voter records to be sure signatures and addresses on the absentee ballot forms matched the information on file at the board of elections.

All week, Buerkle campaign volunteers tried to guess at the Maffei strategy. They were speculating that Maffei was targeting seniors and nursing homes. One of the absentee ballot applications Maffei requested belongs to Jack Cookfair, a Republican political consultant who was working in Buffalo on a state Senate race on Election Day. He said he had not been called.

“There are a lot of things that are public, but there are some things that are private, including how I voted,” Cookfair said. “They’re going to pull every trick.”

Cookfair said the huge paper trail is new territory, “even for guys who have been practicing election law forever.”

Thanks to the copied records of most absentee voters, the campaigns now know the person’s name, address, date of birth, stated reason for voting by absentee ballot and what their signature looks like.

Maffei has not made any public appearances since election night, and members of his own party grumbled about his absence from Veterans Day ceremonies. His staff said he is vacationing with his wife.

Maffei’s staff sent out a statement this week asking the media to report responsibly on the daily developments in the recanvass and counting of absentee ballots. He was confident he would win, the statement said.